Jim Trueblood and his critic-readers: Ralph Ellison's rhetoric of dramatic irony and tall humor in the mid-century American literary public sphere.(Critical essay)

 
  "... I was lost. The more wringlin' and twistin' we done tryin' to git 
  away, the more we wanted to stay ... I know there ain't noth-in' like 
  what I went through, I caint tell how it was. It's like when a real 
  drinkin' man gits drunk, or like when a real sanctified religious 
  woman gits so worked up she jumps outta her clothes, or when a real 
  gamblin' man keeps on gamblin' when he's losin'. You got holt to it 
  and you caint let go even though you want to." 
    "Mr. Norton, sir," I said in a choked voice, "it's time we were 
  getting back to campus. You'll miss your appointments ..." 
    He didn't even look at me. "Please," he said, waving his hand in 
  annoyance. 
    Trueblood seemed to smile at me behind his eyes as he looked from 
  the white man to me and continued.--Ralph Ellison, Invisible 
  Man (1952) (emphasis original) 

Ralph Ellison's fiction and cultural criticism seem always to have compelled attention from the premier literary community, but what, precisely, his work has meant for African American cultural politics has not been so obvious. Some early evaluators of Invisible Man (1952) saw Ellison's use of vernacular materials as a sign of his primary commitment to black life and culture while others saw him as "universalizing" such materials to accommodate elite tastes and standards. Thus, while his first novel met instant reception as a classic in mainstream and African American critical circles, it represented both the great modern romance of "transcendent realty," to borrow Richard Chase's phrase, and the avant-garde race novel to replace Richard Wright's Native Son (1940) with a more fluent, affirming depiction of black figures, scenes, and speech. (1) Yet Ellison was notably not a prolific novelist, so the astounding "visibility" of Invisible Man may now strike us as odd, and scholars are shrewd to look back at this novel published and so well received on the eve of the civil rights movement. In fact, the fifty-year anniversary of the novel inspired something of a revival of attention to Ellison's work, but even a glance at these reflections indicates a continuing lack of consensus about its place in literary history. (2) And in the spirit of vigilance toward rereadings of African American literary history, I want to construct a kind of dialogue in this essay with two prescient recent critiques of Invisible Man and to propose in response to their concerns a reading that highlights the novel's class-based cultural competition with elite readers and which begins by focusing on the dramatic irony--or, more precisely, tall humor--of Jim Trueblood's famous story about committing incest with his daughter.

My rereading of Trueblood's story seeks to locate its potential rhetorical work precisely in the elite public sphere. Given the insights of reader response theorists who emphasize possible reader experiences, I argue that intended elite readers can experience Ellison's dramatic irony as a competitive reach for cultural and moral authority from the African American "lower frequencies" or lower classes. (3) This move may seem critically anachronistic, for when reader-response criticism first arrived during the 1970s, some scholars viewed it as a new ahistorical formalism that theorized readers as mere abstractions, but others have since argued that the sociopolitical dimensions of reading were simply an undeveloped aspect of this work. (4) Specifically, then, my argument is that in chapter 2 of Ellison's novel of twenty-five chapters, the scene of Trueblood's tale offers an interpretive lesson inviting would-be implied readers to approach the balance of the novel not so much as documentation of the "truths" of black life or historical lived experience but, rather, as verbal and cultural performances or speech acts that compete with and, perhaps, undermine their assumptions about the inferiority of black cultural values, knowledge, and authority. My intent is to emphasize that granting the presence of tall humor in the scene both problematizes readers' search for truth and underscores a race- and class-based vernacular intervention in the American literary public sphere, given that the distance forged between the protagonist/narrator and the implied author authorizes an articulate black working-class voice in the sharecropper which presumably elite (black or white) readers must register to accept the role of implied reader. And I have highlighted in my epigraph an exchange from the scene featuring four different raced and classed perspectives--implied author, protagonist/narrator, Trueblood, and Norton--in the hope that its rhetorical complexity will set the stage for the argument I want to make: that, rather than offering an ahistorical spokesperson for a monolithic "blackness" which might likewise "universalize" white subjectivity, Ellison asks readers to recognize sociohistorical division in order to locate rhetorical and aesthetic authority. And thus if he does not dramatize the "truth" of emergent African American life, he writes its felicitous performance into the mid-century public sphere.

It is surely an irony of American literary history that, throughout his career, Ellison pitted himself in critical battle with the same kinds of readers he courted, for example, Richard Chase, R. W. B. Lewis, Stanley Edgar Hyman, Leslie Fiedler, and Irving Howe. Such critics were of course not Ellison's only intended readers, but they represented a great deal of literary authority at mid-century, and I view his "signifying"--or, to use his own term--"antagonistic cooperation" (5) with such readers as central to the rhetoric of his fiction, because they constituted a vocal American audience at times in need of convincing about the humanity, intelligence, and agency of the black lower classes when he composed his novel and later participated in interpretations of it. (6) Indeed, Alan Nadel's study of Ellison's critical communication via literary allusion, Invisible Criticism: Ralph Ellison and the American Canon (1988), begins with an apt thumbnail sketch of the two schools of American literary criticism dominant during his apprenticeship. Both the Progressives and the New Critics, Nadel recalls, were suspicious of modernity and privileged the antebellum period in their constructions of a zenith of American cultural production, though they re-imagined the historical moment differently. Progressive scholars like Lewis Mumford, for example, pastoralized the proletariat as farmer and pioneer in the curriculum-defining study, The Golden Day: A Study in American Literature and Culture (1926), while New Critics valorized a paternalistic "old South." But while Progressives explored American literature for the same reason that New Critics ignored it--that it held potential as a proletarian literature--their idealization of the South erased the presence of African Americans from the literature. For Ellison, Nadel notes, a primary casualty of this view was the moral function blacks had served in nineteenth century American literature, but I would also note the historical irony that the African American presence was thus severed from the "public transcript" (7) that a national literature is even as it was erased from other arenas of public life during the Jim Crow era. And Ellison engages this literary-critical scene when he begins writing Invisible Man during the mid-1940s and includes within it, as Nadel points out, his tendentious allusions to American literary history, both on and off the Progressive critical map.

Of course Ellison does not notice the black absence in American literature in isolation; nor is he alone in his concern about the culture of criticism at mid-century. In a 1950 special issue of Phylon on the state of African American literature, no less than five black writers and scholars declared it a priority that a stronger critical culture be nurtured. (8) And if we hear little these days about the role(s) of the reader(s) when often "signifying" black texts meet the American public sphere, (9) it would seem that shifts in critical and lay audiences must be key considerations because we generally agree that African American literature is a social, performative, antiphonal tradition. William Spurlin, for one, has argued that our primarily text-based theory of signifying reinstitutes a kind of New Critical "literary/nonliterary dichotomy" that has been undercut by post-structural theories and approaches. (10) And Linda Hutcheon, who classifies theories of signifying as indirect theories of irony (31), argues in Irony's Edge: The Theory and Politics of Irony (1994) that irony constitutes a "happening" or performance within "discursive communities" of "shared knowledge, beliefs, values, and communicative strategies" (89-91). Moreover, as the title to her study suggests, Hutcheon claims that while we often forget that irony can serve either conservative or progressive ends, by definition it will have some ideologically freighted "evaluative edge" or "affective dimension"; she thus writes: "The 'scene' of irony involves relations of power based in relations of communication. It unavoidably involves touchy issues such as exclusion and inclusion, intervention and evasion" (2).